We had a discussion about this earlier this year:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2009-04/msg01184.html
Since that we have switched to git, so a lot of it could be
simplified. Instead of the lengthy formatting specification, we could
just require that the patch should apply with "git-am" to git HEAD
without any editing, merging or even apply.whitespace=fix.

That doesn't tell people what information to include, and if they don't
care how the log looks like, they'll do the minimum amount of work to
make git am like it.